Make Me Forget, Let Me Remember
by Lucilla Darkate
Summary: What else is love but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts, and experiences otherwise than we do?[Friedrich Nietzsche]. SSRL, Slash, R, Lupin's POV. Oneshot [Complete]


The way he comes to me is always soft like the night. He comes to me without words, without apology, without fear or regret and he leaves the very same way.

He is not gentle, but then, no one would ever accuse him of that, and he has never claimed to have it in him. He is the evil keeper of the dungeons, brewer of poisons, maker of magic. He is many, many things, most of them secrets that he keeps even from me.

But he can touch me with his stained fingers and make me forget for a little while that he follows a different path than my own, that there is blood on his soul, that there is a monster living under my skin. If he can do that, then I can also forget that I don't trust him. That a part of me has never trusted him. I can forget about soft words whispered against my skin in the dark, promises made and broken, another face, another tangle of raven black hair in my fingers, in another time and another place.

And really, forgetting is what it's all about when it comes right down to it. Forgetting is what we take from each other with every hiss, moan, cry, and thrust. It's not about sex, though the sex is good. It's about touching and being touched where there are no promises about tomorrows, no little hidden endearments, no loving looks passing between us. We fuck, we forget, he leaves, I go to sleep and I do not dream of anything at all. He is a blessing of sorts, and oh what a blessing he is, wrapped in his dark robes, curtained by his long hair, as though he would become a shadow himself if the world would leave him be and allow it.

That is how it began, but now, sometimes when he touches me, he caresses where he otherwise would have pushed and grasped, his black eyes stare into mine as though searching for something, asking some question to which I do not know the answer, and when he leaves…sometimes he lingers at the door for just a little while.

He still brews me the wolfsbane. We are in the heat of a war the likes of which the world has rarely seen, and yet he risks his life to bring it to me each month without fail. It is not a risk I take lightly, though he has risked his life for much less. A quick fuck late at night, when his master and his minions are asleep in their tents. A moment's peace sleeping with his arms linked with mine. A hex that flies too wide or too far on the battlefield when there are more eyes watching than I am comfortable with. I take none of this lightly. He risks too much, and I think…I think it is because he has come to love too much, and for a spy such as himself, that can be a very dangerous thing indeed. 

It is a dangerous thing to respect one's enemy, but what happens when you fall in love with them? Romeo and Juliet, Alexander and Hephaestian, Helen and Paris, Deirdre of the Sorrows—tragedies all. Things which were not meant to be. There is no happy ending here.

I could always ask him to stop, to leave the war, forsake his pledge, abandon what little tattered shreds of honor have been left to him and come away with me. I think he would do it, if I asked. There is a part of him, I know, that waits for me to ask, that longs for it. But I will never ask. I refuse to take that one thing from him. It is all he has left of the Light that he can rightfully claim as his own, and I have too much of that Light in me to take it from him when he needs it most.

It kills me a little every time he leaves me, and it hurts me almost beyond bearing every time he comes back to me again. I would say that it hurts too much to bear, but that is a lie, because I must bear it. I must. As I love him, I must.

So we snatch what joy we can, however fleeting, from the jaws of death, and hold it close. If this is to be all that we will ever have, if one of us should die tomorrow, then I want to know that at least we had this. This was real. This was ours. A quick, dirty little fuck against the wall of some abandoned building on the borderlands between neverland and nowhere, or a stolen kiss in the dark of a mud stained and louse infested tent. It was never beautiful, never romantic, but still, in the end, it was ours, and they can kill us, torture us, burn us and scatter our ashes in the sea, but they cannot take that away from us.

There was time, not long ago, when I would have said, without needing to consider it, that I fear the moon and the wolf within me above all else. Not anymore. Love walks hand in hand with fear. If you love, then something beyond your own skin matters, and if something matters enough…

Would I give my life for him? I doubt that I will ever be asked to, so the only honest answer I can give to that question is, I don't know. I like to think that I would, that I am that noble, that I love as deeply, if not more, than I fear. I like to thinks so, but in truth, I don't know.

So now it seems that we have come full circle in a way; we started out trying to forget, and now we cling to each tiny memory to sustain us in this hell that we have helped to create.

Should it all end now, would we feel the same? Maybe. Or maybe it is what it is _because_ it is what it is.

/finis/


End file.
